The Problems Simply Remain
Luigi beyond the historical present
CW: self-immolation, political assassination, prison death, mass shootings
Luigi Mangione landed in New York last week. Video and images of his prisoner transport stunned spectators with views of a phalanx of police escorts befitting a Marvel supervillain marching Mangione across a helipad, though if internet comments are any indication, the theatrics accomplished nothing more than cementing his status as a folk hero: “Looks like an album cover.” The contradictions were on sharp display in the tableaux as Eric Adams trailed Luigi like a smug schoolyard snitch, despite his insistence that he is “leading from the front” to defend traumatized CEOs.
Amidst the Luigi fever of the past weeks, I found myself as enthusiastic a consumer of the endless stream of new (and immediately memeified) information as anyone else: He’s bisexual. He liked Industrial Society and Its Future, didn’t love Steve-O’s book A Hard Kick in the Nuts. We’ve all seen his abs and read his manifesto. It’s certainly not the first time a fandom has formed around a high-profile case, but the tenor of the fandom feels revealing of the collective American psyche at this specific moment. His targeting of the United Health CEO has sparked a popular redetermination of violence and justice as a whole; the commenters pointing out that he committed an act of murder are countered by many more asking why the privately sanctioned withholding of healthcare doesn’t count as murder. The spectacle of Mangione’s extradition has expanded the scope of comparisons. Why wasn’t Daniel Penny, Jordan Neely’s killer, treated in this way? Or the scores of mass shooters, or the January 6th rioters, or Dylan Roof, the white supremacist who murdered Black churchgoers? Far from being perp walked in a prison jumpsuit and cuffs, he was taken instead to a drive-through by police who bought him McDonalds. The answer is seemingly legible to Americans across the political spectrum: those with wealth and power, when targeted, will do their very best to make an example of anyone who dares threaten them. Briana Boston found herself in these crosshairs after saying the words “Delay, deny, depose” over the phone to her health insurance provider. While they were the same words inscribed by Mangione on shell casings found at the scene of the shooting, their origin was as insurance companies’ very own policy.
The one piece of media that stayed with me most profoundly is a broadcast from News Nation on the conditions of Luigi’s imprisonment in Pennsylvania as he awaited extradition to New York. In the video Ashleigh Banfield, a reporter in the studio, corresponds live with Alex Caprariello, the on-the-ground field correspondent who is stationed outside the prison, who reports that he can see the men inside watching their news program simultaneously. She speaks on air to an unseen broadcast audience, directing questions to the incarcerated men, who shout their responses to Caprariello. I have never seen this tactic employed outside of a protest or noise demo, and to see it on national news is astonishing. YouTube comments under the video are just as revealing, overwhelmingly expressing approval of the way the interview was conducted and appreciative that it gave voice to those on the inside, humanizing the people the prison system works to render invisible.
Inside Virginia’s Red Onion state prison earlier this year, a dozen men set themselves on fire over the span of two weeks, seeking desperately to escape the inhumane and racist conditions inside. You can hear Kevin Rashid Johnson read a statement from Demetrius Wallace here, and find a number of communiques about the conditions at Red Onion. Fight Back News reported that Ekong Eshiet, a Muslim prisoner from Africa, launched a hunger strike, saying “I’m doing my best, like I’m going about this the right way, I guess, like with the hunger strike way. But if I have to, I don’t mind setting myself on fire again. This time, I would set my whole body on fire before I have to stay up here and do the rest of my time.”
Luigi Mangione is awaiting trial at MDC, Brooklyn’s notorious detention center. In 2019, the facility was without heat in the dead of winter for over eight days, resulting in a $10 million class action settlement. Rikers Island is under threat of federal oversight due to its dangerously inhumane conditions. New York City’s jails have been described as “worse than Guantanamo” by people who have been detained at both. Luigi’s case seems to have brought new attention to the conditions incarcerated people in New York are forced to endure (conditions that prisoners* and advocates have been calling attention to…forever) but while eyes have been on his case, 43-year-old Robert Brooks was brutally beaten to death by officers while handcuffed at Marcy Prison in Marcy, NY.
As RAPP campaign’s statement on the murder states, “DOCCS’ policies and practices recall the period before the 1971 uprising at Attica.” I finished Blood in the Water this week and the symmetry is uncanny and devastating; in the epilogue, Heather Ann Thompson recounts George Williams’ 2011 legal battle against correctional officers who beat him severely while incarcerated at Attica, breaking his collarbone and both his legs decades after the rebellion’s survivors’ unceasing efforts toward justice. The “tough on crime” backlash that followed the Attica Uprising closely resembles the fascist backswing we find ourselves in today, post 2020’s George Floyd Uprising and Defund the Police movements. Immediately on the heels of the 1971 rebellion came a period of prison reform efforts, which before long found themselves supplanted by explicitly racist efforts to create “maxi-maxi” prison facilities specifically for those the state deemed political agitators likely to “infect” the rest of the prison population.
Two of the first men to be put on trial for murder for their roles in the Attica uprising were Indigenous men: John Boncore Hill, also known as Splitting the Sky, and Charles Joe Pernasalice. In his speech to the judge on May 8th, 1975, John Hill spoke passionately of the people “murdered by the state,” including the “fourteen million Indian peoples who have been killed in the 19th century.” I am haunted by the ending of his speech, in which he declared “I just want to tell my people that we will we win, we will overcome everything.” He was sentenced to 20 years to life, going on to be granted clemency in 1976 and dedicating his life to political activism. In 1970, in an uprising at the Queens House of Detention that predated the Attica Rebellion, prisoner Victor Martinez speaks to the press, naming the “system that has oppressed us for 400 years” that led up to the moment and describing the “300 men there now ready to die…unless you pigs give us back our life (video at the link).” In all these instances the conditions outside the prison and across history are made explicit, understanding the participants in the uprisings as “engaged in a struggle that exceeded the spatial boundaries of a given institution and the temporal confines of the historical present,” as Orisanmi Burton writes.
Luigi has brought a cohesive set of eyes, along with a healthy dose of virality, to the conditions of the American healthcare and prison systems. He is white, handsome, educated, and from an upper-middle-class family. His actions remind us that those qualities did not insulate or protect him from disability and from debilitating physical pain. The fresh haircut and threaded eyebrows he sported during his extradition demonstrated a solidarity and care among prisoners, as it became clear that both were provided by other men in the Pennsylvania facility where he was held. Watching him walk across the helipad, I found myself scrutinizing his walk, imagining how the cuffs and chains must exacerbate his back pain, and thinking of all the disabled and sick people in prison actively being denied medical care. After the 27th, I think of the so-called medical professionals who watched Robert Brooks be beaten and declined to save his life, and remember the so-called doctors of Attica who kicked a man who had been shot by state troopers as he begged for aid. I think of the gruesome detail (one among countless) that officers tossed prisoners’ dentures into the air, smashing them with baseball bats as if it were a sport. The spectacle around Luigi has breathed virality into demands for healthcare access and prison abolition, and I can only hope that the media momentum will translate into real, actionable solidarity.
There are annual noise demos outside prisons around the country on New Years Eve if you are interested in finding and attending one near you. In New York a demo will be happening outside MDC, where you can show your support for those incarcerated there (yes, including Luigi) and demand justice for Jamel Floyd, who was killed in 2020 when guards pepper sprayed him while being held in solitary confinement.
For news and media on prison conditions and rebellions, I recommend Kite Line Radio, Prison Radio, Perilous Chronicle, and Beyond Prisons.
Reading: Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy. Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. Attica: Then and Now, Still Fighting Back by the Attica Committee to Free Dacajeweiah, via Freedom Archives
“When Attica erupted. many people sought ways to "reform" the prisons to keep them peaceful by making them either less oppressive or more rigid and secure. Many reforms are needed in U.S. prisons. But prison reform will not stop prisoners from rebelling against the conditions of their lives. For the problem lies not in the prisons alone, but in the criminal justice system as a whole and the entire economic and social order it is designed to protect.” -Attica: Then and Now, Still Fighting Back
*Using people-centered language and opposing dehumanizing words like “convict” and “inmate” is critical, and also, naming people as prisoners of the state is also important in naming the power being wielded by the prison system to hold people against their will.
KL Mays is teaching an incredible class with the School of Making Thinking on RAISING THE DEAD: CONTEXTUAL GENEALOGY AND COMMUNITY MEMORY WORK. I’m signing up and you should too :)
